Marcus Brotherton has been writing non-fiction for some time (his oral history
We Who Are Alive and Remain put him on the NY Times bestseller's list!), but
Feast for Thieves is his first foray into the world of fiction.
He has created a host of very strong, memorable characters who inhabit the town of Cut Eye, Texas. Rowdy Slater is the main character, and his journey is very unique! His life is a testimony of God's ability to take a broken vessel and use it in a mighty - and very unexpected - way! Please join me as I discuss Feast For Thieves with Marcus Brotherton! You can read my review of his novel, HERE.
Rowdy Slater – such a
unique character!! You share your inspiration behind the character at the end
of the novel – which is fascinating! I want to know how this character
surprised you as you were creating the story line? (I know there has to be
something he did to keep you guessing!)
Prior to writing the novel, I’d interviewed World War II
veterans steadily for six years while working on nonfiction book projects, so I
learned a lot about the mannerisms and traits of elite ex-paratroopers, the
group I focused on most.
Rowdy came alive gradually. When I started writing the book,
I knew his vital information, his birthdate, his full name, what happened to
his parents, things like that, and I outlined an extensive backstory that I
never used in the book.
What I didn’t know until Rowdy began living within the pages
of the story was the totality of his personality, his unique speech patterns, and
all the actions he would eventually take.
The biggest surprise for me emerged about halfway through
writing the book. On page one, Rowdy robs a bank, but I didn’t know why until
much later. I knew he needed complex, altruistic motives that readers would see
as nearly justifying his criminal actions. But that was as far as Rowdy had revealed
his reasons to me until later in the process.
Sheriff Halligan
Barker reminds me a bit of Andy Tylor in the way he handles law in the area! No
spoilers now, but who inspired this character and his way of handling
law-breakers? (almost expected an Aunt Bea to show up! – maybe that was Mert!)
Ah, I love the old Andy Griffith shows. Halligan certainly
shares some personality traits with Andy Taylor, yet Halligan is rougher around
the edges. He’d shoot to kill if needed.
I wanted a resilient and wise mentor who had a mind like a
chess player, always thinking several moves ahead. Halligan acts firsts and doesn’t
explain himself. He’s an assembling of several people and personality traits I
knew and had seen in real life.
He’s layered, too, a man of sorrows who has kept on living.
Halligan has lost his wife, and his son-in-law was a rotter, but Halligan has
kept his eye on what’s truly important. He lost any pretension along the way.
He’s a bottom-line man who wants his town to succeed and thrive, and he’s well aware
of the serious forces that threaten it.
Bobbie Barker is
another strong, spit-fire of a character that really keeps readers on their
toes! She doesn’t let Rowdy get away with anything! It seems to me she learns
more about day-to-day faith from Rowdy than in all of her study and hard work
until they meet. Have you ever had a Bobbie-like character in real life that
challenged and questioned you at every turn? How did Rowdy know how to handle
her?
Bobbie Barker is one of my most favorite characters. She’s a
composite of people I’ve met. I knew I wanted a strong heroine, almost
surprisingly strong, which Bobbie certainly is.
I also wanted the book’s heroine to have one or two flaws,
which felt truer to real life. Bobbie is a wonderful idealist who wants to save
the world, and she does some remarkable things toward that aim such as keeping
a church together while the bulk of the men in her town are away at war.
But her idealism can emerge in the worst ways. Bobbie is the
world’s worst poet. She keeps reciting her poems and demanding that everyone
appreciates them, which Rowdy just puts up with.
She and Rowdy also struggle in their communication with one
another, which most couples definitely experience. Sometimes you just want to
shake the two of them and say, look—will you just sit down and talk this out!
Cut Eye is a town
filled with problems, and Rowdy takes them on – literally! The first month of
fighting was very telling about his strength and determination. What inspired
this hands-on way of getting things done?
I had that scene in mind for about two years, long before I
outlined the book. Rowdy walks into a bar full of roughhewn men and must beat
them in a series of fistfights before they will come to church.
Later on, one of my early readers read this scene and said,
“Wow, that’s a real metaphor for ministry, isn’t it? A pastor just needs to
keep fighting for what he believes in.”
Rowdy was a man of
secrets, and he faced secrets in the lives of others. Did the fact he had
secrets of his own give him compassion for others that he wouldn’t have had
otherwise?
Absolutely. Rowdy understands what it means to be broken, to
have a past life that’s full of mistakes. He enters his new job with a humility
for the frailty of humanity. He’s compassionate for the underdog, for the person
who’s made desperate choices.
Rowdy’s antithesis is Deputy Roy, who lives only in a world
of black and white. Deputy Roy is only about the law, all the law, all the
time.
Which character has
taught you something unexpected about your personal walk with the Lord?
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Certainly the character of Bobbie Barker and her actions is
a layered picture of what it means to receive grace. Without giving too much of
the book’s ending away, Rowdy eventually must accept what Bobbie does for him.
For all his brawny strength and skilled capability, Rowdy is
helpless without Bobbie along. Rowdy must come to grips with this other great strength,
and what it holds forth for him.
Up until Feast For Thieves, you have written
non-fiction. How does writing fiction differ from writing non-fiction? Which is
easier for you personally?
I have a strong respect for nonfiction and the process it
takes to research a true story and produce a winning book based on that story.
Undoubtedly I’ll continue to write nonfiction, particularly collaboratively.
Yet the opportunity to write a novel held out strong allure to me. I knew I
needed to head that direction to see if I could make it.
With a novel, I found I needed to bring alive everything.
The characters. The story. The world they live in. The conflicts and challenges
that arise. How the characters overcome those obstacles. How everything
resolves satisfyingly at the end.
Fiction offered me a big blank canvas that allowed me to be
as creative as I could be.
How long has Rowdy’s
story been “brewing” in your heart and mind? What was the process like to get
this novel published?
Years. When I first started writing fiction, I was already an
established writer and newspaper journalist. I figured that since I was a
capable writer, all I needed to do was sit down at the keyboard, and the next
“Moby Dick” would flow out of me. I wrote three and a half novels that needed
to be thrown away. All had strengths, but none were good enough to be
published.
After I’d written a few novels that didn’t find publishers, I wised up
and started studying books on the specific craft of fiction writing. I read
book after book after book. Story structure. Plotting. Dialogue. Character
creation. How to write the first thirty pages, which is key. It felt like
getting a university education all over again.
That kind of new, targeted learning needs to happen frequently within
the writing industries, I learned. A person can write a good clear declarative
sentence, for instance, but he or she might not yet know the specifics of a
field to break into—high level blogging, or magazine journalism, or
screenwriting, or novel writing, or whatever. Each specific field of writing
holds secrets to unlock.
I also started to intentionally study novels to see what made them
work. Lots and lots of novels. Books that I liked reading. Books I devoured.
When can we look
forward to another Rowdy Slater novel? Can you give us a sneak peek without
giving away any plot spoilers?
At the end of Feast
for Thieves, Rowdy has come to love and respect the town of Cut Eye, this dusty
wayside community that has embraced him in big ways. So it feels now like he will
need to fight for the town on a greater level than he’s done before. In book 2,
something will threaten to divide the town, perhaps even destroy it.
There’s also the big question of when and how the love story
between Rowdy and Bobbie will finally come together. At the end of Feast for Thieves, we know it’s going to
happen eventually, but we don’t know the details yet. Bobbie is still fired up
to go to Haiti and needs to do her language study at a university first.
More surprises will emerge with these characters for sure.
What does a day of
writing look like for you?
Writing Feast for
Thieves was a process like none other, but on a normal day I get up early
and check email first since I live on the West coast and many of my contacts
are on the East coast. I either take a run or a walk, depending on the day,
then come back home, shower and change and get ready for the day.
My wife and I have three children, so I try to keep fairly
normal office hours for their sake, 8 to 5:30, that type of thing. It’s hard to
write at an intensely creative level for that long in a day, so I write in mornings
and early afternoons then do errands and non creative work later in the
afternoons. Rarely do I work nights or weekends, but I’ll sometimes work a half
day on Saturday morning if I need to catch up.
I know other writers who work best in coffee shops or public
places, but I work best in silence. I have a home office and spend most of my
day working there. I never work with music on, either. I need focused quiet to
work best. I travel by plane on research trips or to promotional events about four
to six times a year, so the travel is quite manageable.
Writing full time is a job that involves multiple stages:
pitching, outlining, researching, writing, editing and revising both with
yourself and the publisher’s team, and promoting. Out of necessity I’m always
working on several projects at once, though each will be at a different stage
of the process. By the time you’re promoting a book, you’re already well into the
next.
What would you say to
encourage someone who wants to get their story published?
I always try to be both realistic and encouraging at the
same time.
Reality says it’s a steep climb to break into the publishing
world. Think of book publishing as a process that takes years to break into and
succeed at, rather than months or weeks. It’s a tricky, highly competitive
industry. You need to do your homework and remained determined.
The encouraging part is that it definitely can be done. People
publish books all the time. You have skills and creativity. Why not you?
If you want to get your story published, then enter the
industry with humility. Make the right contacts. Be polite to everybody you
meet. Study the craft. Financially invest in your career path of writing like
you’d invest in anything else worth obtaining—travel to writing conferences and
pay for outside editing and buy books and resources that teach you more. Pour
your heart into your work-in-progress and bleed onto the page. Then drive hard
for your story to be published.
It can be done. It definitely can be done.
